Matmos: Musique Concrète Smash Hits

Hey, everybody knows that top ten lists are bunk. You don't need a degree in Bourdieu studies to know that canon-building and canon-tweaking are inevitably relative and contingent exercises, but it's just plain fun to rant about things you like. And I heart musique concrète. This genre gets a bad rap-- calling to mind a bunch of white guys in suits who use clunky gear to spew out supposedly revolutionary and certainly unlistenable bloops and fnnrts that actually amount to so much dreary audio-lint. Well, fuck you. I could bend over backwards trying to make musique concrète sound sexy and relevant by arguing that Timbaland's use of a baby crying as a riff in Aaliyah's "Are you That Somebody?" was musique concrète, or that Missy's backwards chorus is musique concrète; that basically any kind of music that uses sound as raw material to be manipulated and reshaped is already musique concrète. But I won't bother, because I happen to LOVE those white guys in their suits and ties.

So my list starts off with them, and then switches gears as the techniques and methodologies of musique concrète become decadent and ingrown and start to infect other genres and mutate in new directions. It was tough picking my faves out from all of the also-rans and borderline cases. Stockhausen's Kontakte, all of Parmegiani's work, Klaus Fessmann's Isn't It Strange in the Cage?, and Takemitsu's film soundtracks certainly belong to the tradition; while Faust's The Faust Tapes, The Art of Noise's "Close to the Edit", Glenn Gould's radio documentaries and Mass Media, Meat Beat Manifesto's Storm the Studio EP, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, Nurse with Wound circa Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion, Negativland, Public Enemy, and People Like Us all arguably build upon it in new ways. Anyway, enough throat clearing, here goes my rundown of ten must-have musique concrète records.

In this time of widespread anti-Gallic philistinism, it pleases me to no end to sing the praises of the decidedly French form of assemblage that is musique concrète and, in particular, to laud its greatest practitioner, Pierre Henry. In a tour de force of editing moxie and sheer sonic daring, Henry took the sounds of a creaking wooden door in the attic of a French country house and the ghostly sigh of human breathing and subjected them to months of intensive snipping, tucking, and warping with the best tape-editing equipment money could buy in 1963. This is one of those "world-in-a-grain-of-sand" gambits, which could have resulted in minimalist sterility but instead explodes into millions of colors, possibilities, practices.

Musique concrète does not get any more articulate or satisfying than this. It's all here, from ghostly vistas of muted whispers to the trademark humorous pongs and boings and tapespeed-manipulated pitch-bends of 60s academic "new music" (which in other hands can sometimes come off as inert or just dippy) to vast groaning chasms that sound like the coffin of the world getting pried wide open. Lately there has been a torrent of Henry reissues in the form of imposingly large and expensive box sets. For the curious, the next place I'd go after Variations would be Fragments Pour Artaud, a suitably frenzied and dramatic evocation of Artaud's ayahuasca experiences in Mexico.

2. Tod DockstaderApocalypse, Quatermass [Starkland]

The expense of state-of-the-art tape editing equipment meant that access to the tools required to make musique concrète was rare in the 60s, which is why so much of the early musique concrète was a product of the academy; big schools had the funds to support institutions like the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio. One exception to this general trend was studio engineer Tod Dockstader, who created sound effects for the children's program Gerald McBoingBoing by day, and stuck around the studio at night creating alien sound worlds out of heavily manipulated recordings of water, laughing, chimes, balloons, white noise, tone generators and cymbals. The result is a kind of alchemical distillation of sound, with Dockstader subjecting his Brobdingnagian archive of source material (said to be 300,000 feet of tape) to a microscopically focused process of editing and recombination. A true pioneer, I've listed both his Apocalypse CD and his Quatermass CD together because you really need them both.

3. Iannis Xenakis La Legende d'Eer [Auvidis/Westdeutscher Rundfunk]

I once sat and listened to this recording in a kitchen whose walls were covered in reflective silver mylar (the fallout of an Andy Warhol/Factory themed house party, don't ask...) with all the lights out during a lightning storm. On acid. The evening concluded with some friends and I running around in the graveyard of the church across the street, during the aforementioned lightning storm, nude. If you hear this record you will know why.

There is an arc of acceleration from the purest of high frequency sine waves to a totally unhinged and massive wall of processed ethnic instruments scraping in vast tidal arcs of quivering, microtonally "off" glissandi. It happens so subtly and inevitably over the course of an hour, you don't notice the transformations until, riptide-like, you've lost all sight of the shore. A totally mammoth and inhuman mindfuck which should be approached with caution and respect.

4. Luc FerrariPresque Rien [INA GRM]

One doesn't tend to turn to musique concrète for meditative calm, but this assemblage of field recordings from a fishing village in the Dalmatian Islands of Yugoslavia at dawn offers precisely that: a letting go of the standard purposes of musical sound (entertainment, rhythmic tug, emotional articulation) in favor of a quietly focused experience of listening to the sounds of the world on their own terms. What could have been an ambient blur is actually a crisp inventory of everyday phenomena: insects tick the hours, a motor boat putts off, a donkey snorts, people talk, trucks pull up. Ferrari's microphone placement (at the windowsill) places a gently domestic, humanist frame around these sounds, and lets them be.

5. György Ligeti "Artikulation" [Wergo]

Clocking in at a pop-single-svelte three minutes and forty-five seconds, this piece makes the most out of the dramatic jumpcuts and juxtapositions which tape editing makes possible-- the sudden upswoops, dropouts and hard-panned bursts of sound call to mind Lee Perry, Wassily Kandinsky and R2D2 with equal aplomb. Ligeti's compositional nous means that even when he's chopping up purely electronic source material (sine waves and snerts and blips and blops), he comes up with something strong and at times almost melodic, like an extended run of backwards reverbed birdsong. The bright and twinkly quasi-riff at the two minute, twenty-three second mark just lights me up every time I hear it. A small jewel.

6. Basil Kirchin Worlds Within Worlds 3/4 [Island]

Anyone who's ever played with a multispeed four track has had that joyful discovery that you can take almost anything and estrange it utterly just by

s l o w i n g i t ddd oo www nnnn.

In 1973 in Schurmatt, Switzerland, composer Basil Kirchin really took this concept about as far as it can go. Alp horns and organs and flugelhorns are stretched and slowed and stretched and flanged into infinite horizon lines and shimmering sonic ridges. But what makes this particularly extraordinary is Kirchin's decision to combine these slurred and smoggy manipulated instrumental sounds with recordings of autistic children, whose cries and laughter and inarticulate sobs burst forth in torrents of the kind of pre-linguistic jouissance that could launch a thousand Julia Kristeva dissertations. Immersive, dark, and magical.

7. Perrey & Kingsley The In Sound from Way Out! [Vanguard]

What are they doing on this list? Egads, everyone knows that this is a kitsch Moog album-- what's so musique concrète about a few synths burbling on blah blah? Well, you're wrong. Musique concrète is a technique, and while it can be used to create experimental noise and pointillist abstraction, it can also be used to make brilliant pop music. Which is what these Israeli/French wonder-twins pulled off with great finesse back in the day, using tightly cropped tape cut-ups to create Rube Goldberg contraption beats with so much snap and fizz that they bubble effortlessly above the supposedly pejorative "novelty factor." If the one-two punch of their "One Note Samba/Spanish Flea" medley doesn't make you smile, then you're probably dead.

8. MerzbowBatztoutai with Memorial Gadgets [RRR]

What is Merzbow doing on this list? Egads, everyone knows that Merzbow just sounds like a lot of hellish distortion blah blah blah. No, you're wrong, and this record will show you why. In an interview I read, Masami Akita fessed up that this record involves turntable and cut-up manipulations of his favorite academic musique concrète records, offset with a heaping helping of overdubs and Merzbow-osity. What Coldcut's Journeys by DJs set is to the hip-hop mixtape, this baby is to musique concrète: a double exposure of elaborately detourned and fricasseed material which was already quite tricked out in the first place. Reissued on a double CD as Batztoutai with Material Gadgets, so now you finally know.

9. Doctor Rockit Doctor Rockit [Clear]

Supposedly some bad blood exists between the Clear camp and Matthew Herbert so I'm not sure that this material is going to get reissued, which is a shame because this record is fantastic. Herbert's trademark swingtime shuffling house beats bounce all around the room, but a peep at the song titles like "Cameras and Rocks" reveals that many of the songs are made out of everyday, non-musical objects. Which explains why they have so much grain, personality and character.

Herbert's alter-ego Wishmountain took this musique concrète + sequencer equation even further, producing monstrous floor rockin' techno-house jams out of the sounds of salad tossers and potato chip packets. This is a best-case scenario for how sampling technology can carry on the musique concrète torch, keeping its materialist spirit alive but hot-rodding it into unexpectedly populist new shapes. Thumbs way, way up.

10. G*ParkSeismogramm [Schimpfluch]

An arcane offering from a Swiss label whose output tends to concentrate on abject screaming and extended chunks of total silence, so good luck finding it. I'm not being a snob and rubbing it in but I do think it's out of print. Which is awful because this is one beautiful record. Marvelously organic close-mic'd sounds (a cat mewling, the branches of a tree twisting in the wind) are spaced and rearranged with a tranquility, clarity and focus that's sadly uncommon in musique concrète made in the wake of widely available sampling technology. There's a kind of autumnal elegance to G*Park's restrained, low-key filtering and EQ work which bathes each sound in a warm mid-range glow. Somebody has just got to reissue this.